In recent years, the annual rate of increase among physicians has remained relatively flat while the number of pharmaceutical sales representatives has grown considerably overall, even accounting for recent reductions in field force sizes. As a result, sales call effectiveness has waned in the face of a changing market and physicians' increasingly busy schedules, forcing life sciences organizations to transform their sales and marketing capabilities. Pharmaceutical companies face stiff challenges in terms of completion, cost escalation and reduction in margins, while promoting their products by sending out sales representatives to doctors, hospitals and other medical organizations. Typically the sales representatives, in the few minutes that they get with the audience/doctors, orally explain the complicated details of the medical product and then give handouts, such as presentation material on the product in paper form. A very likely result of such an approach is that after the session the audience would have already forgotten much, depending on the oral presentation skills of the representative, and the handouts will most likely be thrown away. A more effective approach would be to provide the sales representative with an animated presentation that would be more engaging for the little time allotted to the presentation. The sales representative could then use the user interface (“UI”) of the presentation application to navigate through the presentation in an engaging and informative manner.
In a typical UI toolbar, toolbar buttons are individually configured for event handling. For example, a toolbar might include a “Details” button to provide more information about what is displayed in a particular screenshot. If a developer wants to change the type of information displayed when “Details” is pressed, the developer must make those changes in the code and recompile the code. This manual reconfiguration leads to duplicative efforts and increased complexity, as well as decreased code reuse. Manual reconfiguration also prevents an end-user from reconfiguring the toolbar.